Interesting reports from the Stoke-on-Trent electoral coalface February 12, 2017

Don’t know if any of you have been following All That Is Solid … from A Very Public Sociologist but there have been regular reports from the by-election campaign there and indeed the state of the BLP in that constituency for quite some time now. Well worth a read not least for an insight into the reality, as against the media perception, of the UKIP campaign (at least so far).

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The kippers really know how to pick ’em don’t they? Nuttall makes farage look statesmanlike. He’ll be gone in a year.
I was in Stoke for a few days just over a year ago and, without doing the sort of superficial Road to Wigan Pier sociology that visiting journalists do, it really doesn’t look like the sort of place that Tristram Hunt would represent in the sense of being typical of it. The fact that Labour has treated such seats as being within the gift of central office has to be a large part of why its under threat.

Mind you, in 1930, one of the Stoke seats was represented by Lady Cynthia Mosley, daughter of that lord who lived more than fifty years believing that most of the voters of that area had different colour skins to him, and wife of (admittedly then Labour) Oswald Mosley.

The Stoke LP bureaucracy is notoriously right-wing. The rank-and file voted overwhelmingly for Corbyn in the leadership election and since then the Blairites who control the Stoke LP have engaged in a vicious witch hunt purging Corbyn supporters from the local constituency and removing all known Corbyn supporters from the candidate short-list (including two local councillors). The Blairites in the Stoke LP have previously expelled LP councillors who voted against austerity cuts.

The selection convention for the by-election was a stitch-up and the candidate, Snell, was LP head honcho of Newcastle-Under-Lyme council when it imposed the most vicious austerity cuts over the last couple of years and a bag man for the retiring Blairite, Hunt.

The LP could well lose this by-election but if it does so it will be an utter indictment of the Blairites in the LP and everything they stand for – yet it will portrayed as a defeat for Corbyn. It does raise the question of why Corbyn continues to refuse to act against the Blairites who control the PLP, LP HQ and the local councils. As long as he continues to try and placate them he is exposing himself to repeated and ongoing attacks that will inevitably result in his removal (and the likely demise of the LP).